Facebook and iLike a good match

iLike, the Seattle startup that links people with similar music interests, is growing like crazy since linking up with Facebook as part of the social networking site’s embrace of new Web applications.

VentureBeat has the details, writing that about 180,000 users have signed up with iLike in the past few days. That’s well ahead of other applications.

The rapid growth has put iLike in a strange situation in which company co-founder Ali Partovi is doing everything he can to find the server space to keep up with the demand.

In a blog post Saturday, iLike said it added 50,000 users in its first 20 hours with the momentum accelerating.

“We started the system not knowing what to expect, with only 2 servers, but ready with backup. Facebook’s rabid userbase chewed up our 2 servers almost instantly. We doubled our capacity to catch up. And then we doubled it again. And again. And again. Oh crap – we ran out of servers!! Although iLike.com has a very healthy level of Web traffic, and even though about half of all the servers in our datacenter were sitting unused, idle, as backup capacity, we are now completely maxed out.”

The company also noted that the Facebook integration was a “critical day in iLike’s history.”

“The Facebook Platform enabled us to build a service that in a single day matched and beat the impressive traffic we built on iLike.com in over 6 months. iLike is now growing at more than twice the pace it was yesterday, and accelerating. Fasten your seatbelts everybody, here we come!”